NEW YORK, March 17, 2018 - In 1993, after taking a summer off to attend film school at NYU, Daryl Hannah wrote, directed, and produced the short film The Last Supper, which won a Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. But it took until now for her to make her full-length feature directorial debut: Paradox, a lo-fi, sci-fi western musical starring her boyfriend Neil Young, Promise of the Real, and Willie Nelson, which premiered Thursday night at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. "I can't even tell you how many years I told my manager I wanted [to direct]," Hannah tells Yahoo Entertainment. "I have been working on actual, real scripts and stuff for years, and have things that I've developed over the years that I wanted to make as narrative features, and I never even could get a meeting. I even had production deals, but they were always kind of like vanity production deals, ultimately." Hannah, who has spoken before about being sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein (including one scary encounter when he burst into her hotel room), pauses when asked about her struggles in Hollywood. "There's so many stories, but I actually never got a meeting on a movie after Kill Bill, not one — not an offer, not a meeting, not an anything. The next thing I got was Sense8, and that was accidental. They called me for a phone number for somebody else, and they were like, ‘Why don't you come in?' I have no idea why. [Kill Bill] was a big, successful movie, but I never got even a meeting, nothing. I think it was ... maybe tied slightly to the Harvey thing, because that was part of it. He was telling people I was ‘difficult,' because I kicked him out of my room!" Interestingly, in Paradox, a movie made far outside the Hollywood machine, Hannah envisions a utopian future "when the womenfolk had rightfully just about given up" on men, in which a band of male outlaw prospectors — led by Young's grizzled character, "the Man in the Black Hat" — work for a tribe of frontierswomen. "Every once in a while, I think probably almost every woman has fantasized about just living in a commune or something with their girlfriends and making art and raising babies and growing food, and just letting the guys come visit once in a while," Hannah chuckles. "[Paradox] was just sort of a little exploration of that fantasy, that in the future women have just said, ‘You know what? We're done with the mining, the plundering, the pillaging, the fighting. We're just going to go over here. We'll take care of the land. We'll take care of the kids. You guys try to stay alive. We'll come and visit you once in a while.' The women [in the film] still have a good feeling about the men, though — it's not like they've written them off completely!" The real man in Daryl's life, Neil Young, says he was delighted to be part of Hannah's quirky vision. "Daryl did everything. She wrote the script, she went out to the thrift shops and bought all of the costumes herself," he marvels. "She is a real artist, and she knows what she wants. She wrote what everybody said. She gave us good direction throughout the whole thing. ... Daryl is great at what she does. She's a true professional, and a joy to work with." "[Neil] has such a natural communication with the artistic process that he doesn't question it, ever," Hannah adds. "He just was like, ‘Oh, yeah, right. We're making a movie.' It was very natural." Young says he trusted his partner's vision so much, "I never read the script. ... I said, ‘Why don't you just tell me my lines?' She told me about the story, and so I wanted to see it develop."
